swarm

A coordinator for sending several workers to investigate separate parts of a task or compare multiple approaches, then combining their results into one report.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a task can be split among independent workers, when several solutions should be compared, or when parallel checks are useful.
Why use it?
It increases coverage for parallel exploration, races, and testing under competing conditions without making the user collect each worker's result manually.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/swarm
Any agent
npx skills add ericlitman/open-pstack --skill swarm
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericlitman/open-pstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 645 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00041 $0.00645
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00322
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00129
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00064

Measured 2d ago against content hash aa57ee72e3da, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

swarm scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/pstack/skills/swarm/SKILL.md · 48 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 48 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Swarm

Fan out N parallel workers. They may cover separate slices, race the same brief, or mix both. The parent waits, aggregates, and returns one report.

Dispatch contract. Resolve each worker descriptor through provider-dispatch.md. The parent starts native and external lanes; workers never route themselves. On Codex, resolve remaining Claude tool names via codex-tools.md.

Start

Open a todolist with one entry per phase before launching anything.

  1. Frame
  2. Fan out
  3. Aggregate
  4. Report

Phase A: Frame

  1. State the done predicate and the artifact or report the swarm must return.
  2. Choose the shape. Partition into slices, race N workers on identical briefs, or mix both. For a race or mixed shape, declare first pass, rank all, or best-of before spawning.
  3. Set N from the user or derive it from the shape. N is total workers, not the number that run at once.
  4. Pick the worker descriptor from swarm workers in the current harness's pstack model sheet when present. Otherwise use grok:grok-4.6@xhigh. For a model race, name each arm's descriptor up front.
  5. Give each worker its own writable output when it writes. Use a worktree, branch, or /tmp/swarm-<slug>/worker-<n>/.

Phase B: Fan out

Start all N workers in one fan-out phase through provider dispatch. Native lanes use background subagents; external lanes invoke the launcher as background work with retained task/session handles. Never use Claude's foreground Bash path for a long worker. Every writer runs in its assigned worktree or output directory. Isolation comes from those paths, not the provider.

When a worker must start from a non-default branch, check that branch out in the worker's own worktree and name the worktree path in its brief.

Every brief stands alone. Include the goal, scope, exact slice or race arm, how to verify, and what to report. Reports use PASS, ISSUES, or BLOCKED with evidence.

Read the full file on GitHub · 48 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 48 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A aa57ee72e3da

Subscribe to this mod's changes

swarm is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericlitman/open-pstack (155 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 645 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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